Unlike most IT players showing pessimism about the future of the PC industry, Michael Dell, CEO of of his namesake company, has optimistically stressed that Dell's PC business will continue to thrive as the advent of 5G and the raging development of AI applications will fuel the demand for multiple advanced cloud and edge computing algorithms, thus providing more space for the development of PC products and computing applications.

IBM declared the beginning of a "post-PC era" 20 years ago, prompting many to feel pessimistic about the PC prospects. Over the past 20 years, however, more than four billion PCs have been sold globally, and IBM was right in that computing would expand to include embedded devices, the CEO said while speaking at his firm's recent major annual conference.

Now the world's No. 3 PC brand and top server vendor with its affiliate EMC as the leading storage vendor and VMware as the largest supplier of virtualization software products, Dell is continuing its business integration and consolidation efforts, seeking to provide customers with more comprehensive hardware and software solutions ranging from terminal devices to cloud architectures, according to the CEO.

The CEO also stressed that Dell has kept gaining market shares in both the PC and server sectors in the last five years, and expects to sustain the growth trend in the next few years. He added that Dell will focus more on its PC business in the hope of maintaining significant shipment momentums in the process of continuous PC evolutions and advancements.

He pointed out that computing innovation still has a long way to go, as the generation of increasingly immense data and the demand for real-time computing will bring diverse scenarios for computer algorithms, especially those for AI applications now under rampant development by enterprises and industries.

It's difficult to develop unified AI application platforms because different industries have different needs. But this will serve to generate more business opportunities, spur more innovations in data collection, storage, transmission and computing algorithms, and stimulate more innovative applications including autonomous driving, AR/VR, according to Dell.